Posted!

Join the Conversation

Comments

Welcome to our new and improved comments, which are for subscribers only.
This is a test to see whether we can improve the experience for you.
You do not need a Facebook profile to participate.

You will need to register before adding a comment.
Typed comments will be lost if you are not logged in.

Please be polite.
It's OK to disagree with someone's ideas, but personal attacks, insults, threats, hate speech, advocating violence and other violations can result in a ban.
If you see comments in violation of our community guidelines, please report them.

Now it seems someone with measles visiting Disneyland around the New Year infected close to 40 other visitors and employees at the park, the majority of them unvaccinated. They carried the virus home with them and have in turn infected at least another 100 people, most of them in California but some carrying the virus with them to seven other states, Canada and Mexico (L.A. Times, Feb. 19).

Measles is an airborne virus and fiercely contagious. I remember one of my mentors, Stan Foster from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, telling about the case of a Nigerian infant infected during an afternoon clinic visit, where the infected “contact” case had left the clinic early that morning. The virus was still hanging around in the air six hours later, awaiting the arrival of an unvaccinated person.

In a previous marriage, my Ghanaian wife Mary lost three children to diseases preventable by vaccination: two to neo-natal tetanus and one to measles. One of her sister’s children, a girl born in 1975, was crippled by polio. When I was working for UNICEF, Mary never complained about my abandoning the family for 60- to 80-hour workweeks. “UNICEF owes me three children,” she used to say, pushing me out the door.

Where child nutrition or health are already compromised, measles, whooping cough, diphtheria, tetanus and polio qualify as “killer diseases.” Today, thanks to vaccination systems put in place around the world over the last 30 years, millions of children’s lives are saved annually and millions more are spared disabilities.

When I was growing up in 1950s America, almost every child got infected with the measles and polio viruses. Out of 100 children infected, “only” one or two became paralyzed from polio. Tell that “only” to the mother and the crippled child! With measles, most suffered a bad week or two, got a rash and recovered. But a few got pneumonia and died, a few went blind, some became deaf, and many pregnant women who got rubella gave birth to children with serious disabilities.

All that stopped by the 1980s and ’90s. America’s highly successful program of vaccination virtually eliminated measles, mumps, rubella, polio, whooping cough, diphtheria and neo-natal tetanus from the United States.

Hence, American parents with newborn babies today never saw those diseases. And too many, when they read someone’s crackpot theory that measles vaccination might be linked to autism, or hear that in one or two cases out of a million the vaccine for whooping cough causes a serious reaction, they freak out. Thanks to decades of good public health work, and to the sense of responsibility of more than 90 percent of other families, these freaked-out parents get to avoid the repercussions of their own hysterias, selfishness or just old-fashioned stupidity, at least for a time.

Over the last 15 years, more and more parents have chosen to rely on others getting their children vaccinated as protection for their own children. But as more and more join them in this folly, they put not only their own children but the children of others at risk as well.

For a very few children, there are legitimate medical reasons not to vaccinate them. For all the other families who refuse vaccination for reasons of personal belief, let them have their rights to say no, but also demand that they shoulder responsibility for any consequences of their refusals. When there are outbreaks, the 90 percent and more of responsible parents have a right to demand that doctors and other officials keep children of families that refused vaccination away from clinics, schools, child care centers and other public spaces. Perhaps when such families sign waivers of vaccination based on “personal belief,” those documents could also include a waiver of health insurance coverage for hospital treatment costs of those vaccine-preventable diseases.

Who knows, if society could put a price on selfishness, hysteria and stupidity, our current epidemic of those might even begin to abate!

Writers’ Group member Alan Brody’s work with UNICEF from 1983-2006 included promotion of childhood immunization.